The Scourge of The Dark Side...Tolkien and Modernism

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Originally Posted by McCaber

That assumes that God experiences time in the same way we do. We see the timestream as a flow moving in one direction, but God could see it as an outside observer, like us looking at a drawn timeline; or he could experience all time as Now.

I don't think it matters whether God sees time as a drawn line or if he experiences all time as now. The key point is whether there is randomness, or if all things can be predicted and understood if you only knew every single factor influencing the event. If the latter is true, and there is a grand equation for all of existance into which an allmighty being can insert all the - for us - unknown numbers, and predict all that is to come until the end of time, I can see how this deity could see into the future without messing with the free will. But then again, he would know everything his children would do at the very moment he created them too, and they would not be free in any actual sense.

Or is it perhaps chaos that governs the universe? Think of the butterfly effect. Every event, although seemingly uninportant, has the potential to change the world. Had fex. Hitler succeeded as a painter the world might have been a very different place. Will a mouse in a maze always choose the same path, given the exact same conditions? If the answer is no, the future must be uncertain, and no amount of omnipotence could get around that.

I love tough theological questions.

I certainly don't know the answers to these questions but they are intriging nonetheless.